Please do not blame me. As I look around for more info I get slightly different versions. The latest finding is that the projectile itself will have an explosive charge in it and it will create a crator, 4m in diam, and 80cm in depth.

My understanding is the spacecraft will be in a stand-off position during this phase and then approach later to sample/collect the (hopefully) pristine material inside the crater. I guess this supposed "sticky" collection device would operate in some sort of fly-through of the ejecta?

There was a repeat TV programme on Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 on NHK today (13 August). I had not watched it before. What caught my attention most was the shape of the impacter as they called it and the sequence of crater making.

The impacter had a shape of a typical drum, but about one third of the way down from the top it had a disk sticking out all around the drum. The disk width was about one third of the drum diameter, I think.

Detonation sequence is something I do not trust my memory about. It was so brief, literally a few seconds. Now, there was a clear explosion on the asteroid surface, but, at that same moment the drum was still in the air, that is what I remember. I may be wrong, of course...

10^3 uprating--that's a dramatic improvement in engine thrust. I wonder if that indicates advancement in the technology, or just more confidence in pushing the existing design harder based on all the experience gained with Hayabusa 1?

Retaining the sampler horn schema is surprising as well. Don't see why they'd do that unless they feel very certain that they understand what went wrong on H1...has anything been published to indicate that? (I would be surprised if much of the post-flight engineering analysis has been translated into English, if it's even been publicly released in Japanese in the first place.)

--------------------

A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

P., I know that Emily will ask for a reference in the event that she decides to write about this (and it wouldn't surprise me if she did; Hayabusa 1 enjoyed considerable mass media attention by the normal standards of UMSF); do you have one handy in either Japanese or English?

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

I have got this feeling that we may shift this topic into Hayabusa 2 which already exsists. The reason is that Hayabusa 1's news will continue to come in, I think, in the next year and it might become confusing to talk about the two within the same stream...

Perhaps, I should have done just that myself in the first place, if I come to think about it...

Another crazy thought... I was not sure where I should put this in and in the end chose this place. I am still talking about the need for engineering cameras.

Although, not directory relevant to interplanetatry missions, I tell you one episode about Hayabusa's capsule helicopter recovery. Heat shield and its inrared signnature and all that.

They did a rehearsal before hand, and what they used was a traditional Japanese feet warmer used in your bed filled with warm water. These things used to be made of corrugated metals, but increasingly these are now made of plastics, to hold warm water inside them.

I do not use one, as I use my electric bluncket, but there are still people, eldery people, who prefer these traditional warmers. Having said that, let me come to the main issue, engineering cameras.

With Hayabusa Minerva was lost (and only one image returned to earth, I think), and it must have been a very expensive system. However, prior to that deployment they sent a target marker down to the surface of the asteroid. That thing was remarkably primitive, with multi-rfelection surfaces, but what it boiled down to was another traditional thing, called ohajiki, for mainly small girls to play with.

Ohajiki is made of small beans and enclosed in a cloth (here on earth, that is) container to make it roughly round, about 5 cm in diam. With Hayabusa, two of them was used, as I remember, and the idea was that on landing they do not rebounce.

Now, if we have an engineering camara, with a fish eye lens attached to it, can we not forget about MINERVA kind of sophisticated and expensive monitoring devices? Whether angle setting is right or not should not matter as long as a fish eye lens is attached with the marker. It does not be firmly fixed, for cost saving, I think.

If we can arrange for that kind of markers, then we should be able to see what is coming down from above, and even what went wrong on landing, etc, etc. Of course, we should have another camera on board the probe itself.

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